The Minotaur Project philosophy

Like many who grew up during the dawn of videogaming time we have fond memories of the old games from that
era. Although no doubt primitive by
modern standards there was a certain
charm about their low-rez
aesthetic.

These days it's easy for players to
revisit these old games through the
use of emulation. However quite
often when we do, we find that many of
the old games, although charming, do
not hold the attention as well as we
hoped they might.

The reason is due to the same kinds
of limitation that imposed the
primitive graphic style of the games
on the designers back then. Mainly
lack of memory and the inability
to do much more maths than just
addition and subtraction without
having to wait for next Wednesday for
the answers.

VCS graphics, for example, may have a
certain blocky charm but the system'
other limitations are near crippling.
We all remember games with sprites
that flickered horribly, or where
the designer struggled to make
something playable with hardly any
freely available movable objects and
very little RAM.

And yet miracles were wrought by
awesomely skilful designers who
through prodigious feats of programming
managed to wring out of the old thing
games far more advanced than even the
system's designers thought possible
when it was made.

The Minotaur project arose during a
time when I was spending a fair bit
of time playing old games on my own
collection of retro machines. Quite
often I'd play for a few minutes and
then move on to the next. It's sad
but many of the old games don't really
satisfy any more. The limitations we
forgave and overlooked back then are
all too apparent now.

And yet, I love the style of some of
those oldies! I've thought before it'd
be fun to code up something on one of
the old beasts, and even got as far as
doing a bit of VCS kernel programming
for fun. It certainly is a lot of fun,
but to produce a whole game would take
quite a long time, and I would run into
the same limitations and problems as
the old designers had.

Then I thought: why not make some new
games in the STYLE of the old games,
but using modern hardware? By doing
that I would be free to choose the
things that genuinely were charming
about the old games, but leave behind
all that nonsense about sprite flicker,
amnesiac amounts of memory and CPU
chips with the mathematical ability
of a wounded stoat.

In fact we'd be free to do whatever
we liked whilst still providing
players with an aesthetic that will
hopefully still produce a nice
nostalgic glow.

Another reason doing such games
appeals to me is because it'll put
a bit of fun back into my development
life. Project turnover back then was
pretty fast and you'd generally get
several projects done per year. These
days it's much more of a long slog
with projects often taking a year or
more to complete.

The iOS platform with its apps seems
also well suited to this kind of game
where one isn't necessarily seeking
out some epic adventure that'll take
hours to play - quite often you just
want a bit of simple, fun,
arcade-gamey action.

I needed to get something together to
show at R3PLAY, a retrogaming expo in
Blackpool, and so the Minotaur project
was begun.

The goal of the Minotaur project is
to make new games in the style of old
hardware, but with none of the
limitations of the original
platforms and a thoroughly modern heart
inside giving gameplay sufficiently
rewarding and involving for today's
players.

We've begun in the VCS-era and this
first game is presented on the
entirely fictional 'Ataurus TVC 2605'
which uses primitive graphic shapes
but allows for an effectively
unlimited number of them on screen, and
also for some fullscreen feedback
effects. Things that would have been
entirely impossible back in the day.

The ATAURUS boot screen.

I took the liberty of giving it the
character screen from a Commodore PET,
because let's face it, text was never
a strong point of the VCS and its
brethren, and in the spirit of
iscarding the unnecessarily ugly
parts of the retro experience I thought
at least a PET screen would be better
than VCS text.

What I have retained is the primitive
shapes from back then. With no prospect
of being able to attain realism,
games from that era were starkly
abstract and pared down, and in that
simplicity there was a kind of eloquence.
Rather than there being an arrow on a radar
representing our ship, the arrow WAS your
ship. It gave games a kind of enforced
'cyberspatial' aesthetic; one was very
much aware of dealing with virtual
objects in a synthetic world. Realism
obviously has its place in modern
gaming and I wouldn't be without it,
but for some kinds of game the feeling
of playing in that pure, abstract
world, directly manipulating the
symbols that represented the pieces of
the game design, is often rather
lacking.

Oldschool style but no limits.

It is that 'pure abstraction' aesthetic,
enforced by the hardware limitations of
old game systems, which led to
creations like the iconic film TRON
and the classic abstract 'cyberspace'
representation you always see in
hacker films.

The fact that so many games try to
look like Geometry Wars, a game
whose look was designed specifially
to evoke the sparsely abstract games
of old vector systems, shows that
there is still a desire of players
to play once more in that pure,
symbolic space, deliberately far
from any thought of realism.

Of course we can present that
abstraction much more cleanly and
beautifully than the old systems
could. Everything can be smooth
and pure, with no flickering or
juddering sprites. We can even impart
a delicate glow to the scene, allowing
objects to leave persistence trails
as if limned in phosphor glow.

Game Over should always look pretty.

Whereas in the old days players were
forced into the abstract space at
gunpoint by hardware limitations,
now we can revisit the place at
leisure, explore it better, and
perhaps buy a nice little holiday
construct by the Game Grid.

Each of us has fond memories of the
vehicles that took us there, back
then - for some it was the VCS,
for others a Vic-20, or an
Intellivision, or a Speccy.

If people like what I've done with
the VCS-era look here then I'll
expand out and do more Minotaur
project games in the style of other
systems. Blinged-out VIC-20 anyone?
Intellivision 3000? The Speccy from
a parallel universe where Uncle
Clive came to dominate the entire
computer market, and where everybody
drives C500s, where the QL has real
qbits in, and where games are played
on the Universal UltraSpeccy?

I think it'd be a lot of fun to
imagine such machines, and then to
write games for them! And that's what
the Minotaur project is about.

As for this first Minotaur project
game, I've tried to imagine what a
designer back then might have come
up with if he had access to my
fictional 'Ataurus TVC 2605'. It
draws inspiration from various games
of that era (and one from way before
that era, MIT 'Spacewars' which is
actually older than I am!) to create
a composite whole which is, I hope,
pleasantly evocative of oldtime
favourites but enough of a new game
to stand on its own merits.

The spacecraft themselves are the
pointy coloured arrows which featured
in many a space game of that era.
The challenges are inspired by a
bunch of different games - the sun
and gravity well from Spacewars; rocks
as obstacles like in other games
of that era; attacking saucers that
hinder your ongoing solar defence
mission, failure in which results
in the sun turning into a black
ole, creating a gameplay event that
dangerous and chaotic but survivable;
mining/collection objective;
having to grab entities before
they fall into the sun - I've been
trying to think as a designer of the
day might have thought, coming up with
a design through a balance of influence
and creativity to hopefully produce
something new-yet-old and fun to play
even for today's players.

The iPad even allows us to revisit the
time when 'multiplayer' meant 4
joysticks plugged into a VCS or Atari
8-bit, thanks to multitouch and having
a sufficiently large screen to just
about allow 4 players to have a bit of
control surface. Hell, it'll work on
an iPhone too but by the time 4 players
have their fingers on the screen I
doubt you'd be able to see any of it,
so on iPhone I limited the number of
simultaneous players to 2.

Multiplayer madness.

I've really enjoyed making this - it's
been quick and fun to do (the actual
gameplay was done start to finish in a
month) - there's other infrastructure
that takes a bit more time but once
that's done and we have a viable
framework that gets through the
submission process then it'll be
quick and easy to do many more
of these Minotaur project games.